Who the &%&# Is Henry Jenkins?

Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

Until recently, Jenkins wrote a monthly column and blogged about media and cultural change for Technology Review Online. A longtime advocate of games culture, he currently co-authors a column with Kurt Squire for Computer Games magazine which seeks to promote innovation and diversity in game design. Jenkins recently developed a white paper on the future of media literacy education for the MacArthur Foundation, which is leading to a three year project to develop curricular materials to help teachers and parents better prepare young people for full participation in contemporary culture. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He was also one of the principal investigators on collaboration with Initiative Media to monitor audience response to American Idol with an eye towards developing new approaches to audience measurement. He is one of the leaders of the Convergence Culture Consortium, which consults with leading players in the branded entertainment sector in hopes of helping them adjust to shifts in the media environment. Jenkins also plays a significant role as a public advocate for fans, gamers, and bloggers: testifying before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee investigation into “Marketing Violence to Youth” following the Columbine shootings; advocating for media literacy education before the Federal Communications Commission; calling for a more consumer-oriented approach to intellectual property at a closed door meeting of the governing body of the World Economic Forum; signing amicus briefs in opposition to games censorship; and regularly speaking to the press and other media about aspects of media change and popular culture. Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at MIT for more than 16 years, where he is also housemaster of Senior House dormitory.

Well, that didn’t seem so simple after all. For a somewhat more personal account of whom I am, read below.

ABOUT ME

The first thing you are going to discover about me, oh reader of this blog, is that I am prolific as hell. The second is that I am also long-winded as all get out. As someone famous once said (Thomas Jefferson, I think), I would have written it shorter but I didn’t have enough time.

My earliest work centered on television fans — particularly science fiction fans. Part of what drew me into graduate school in media studies was a fascination with popular culture. I grew up reading Mad magazine and Famous Monsters of Filmland — and much as my parents feared, it warped me for life. Early on, I discovered the joys of comic books and science fiction, spent time playing around with monster makeup, starting writing scripts for my own Super 8 movies (the big problem was that I didn’t have access to a camera until much later), and collecting television-themed toys. By the time I went to college, I was regularly attending science fiction conventions. Through the woman who would become my wife, I discovered fan fiction. And we spent a great deal of time debating our very different ways of reading our favorite television series.

Textual Poachers

When I got to graduate school, I was struck by how impoverished the academic framework for thinking about media spectatorship was — basically, though everyone framed it differently, consumers were assumed to be passive, brainless, inarticulate, and brainwashed. None of this jelled well with my own robust experience of being a fan of popular culture. I was lucky enough to get to study under John Fiske, first at Iowa and then at University of Wisconsin-Madison, who introduced me to the cultural studies perspective. Fiske was a key advocate of ethnographic audience research, arguing that media consumers had more tricks up their sleeves than most academic theory acknowledged.

Out of this tension between academic theory and fan experience emerged first an essay, “Star Trek Reread, Rerun, Rewritten” and then a book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Textual Poachers emerged at a moment when fans were still largely marginal to the way mass media was produced and consumed, still hidden from the view of most “average consumers” and as such, represented a radically different way of thinking about how one might live in relation to media texts. In the book, I describe them as “rogue readers.” What most people took from that book was my concept of “poaching,” the idea that fans construct their own culture — fan fiction, artwork, costumes, music, and videos — from content appropriated from mass media, reshaping it to serve their own needs and interests. There are two other key concepts in this early work which takes on greater significance in my work today — the idea of participatory culture (which runs throughout the Convergence Culture book) and the idea of a moral economy (that is, the presumed ethical norms which govern the relations between media producers and consumers.)

Aca/Fan Defined

Textual Poachers and much of my subsequent work has been written from the perspective of an Aca/Fan — that is, a hybrid creature which is part fan and part academic (hence the current, provisional title of this blog). The goal of my work has been to bridge the gap between these two worlds. I take it as a personal challenge to find a way to break cultural theory out of the academic bookstore ghetto and open up a larger space to talk about the media that matters to us from a consumer’s point of view. This philosophy has governed my various stabs at journalism and public advocacy and they are what are motivating me to develop a personal blog.

Convergence Culture

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Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide returns to this question of media audiences and participatory cultures at a moment where fans and fan-like activities are absolutely central to the way the culture industries operate. At all levels, the assumption is that consumers will become active participants but there is widespread dispute about the terms of our participation. We are seeing enormous experimentation into the potential intersections between commercial and grassroots culture and about the power of living within a networked society. At the same time, the media industries are struggling to keep up with these changes, issuing contradictory responses out of different divisions within the same companies. Convergence Culture was designed as a public intervention into this situation, trying to help both consumers and producers understand the changes which are occurring in their relationship.

Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, my second new book, maps the transition between the world described in Textual Poachers and the world depicted in Convergence Culture: it reprints many of my key essays about participatory culture through the years, including early writings about fans and later writings which sought to respond to some of the moral panic kicked up by Columbine and claims that games and other forms of popular culture were leading young people to the brink of damnation.

It’s safe to say that neither of these books would have come about if I had not moved to MIT 16 years ago and found myself immersed in the vibrant digital culture of the past decade. I often claim that I am a walking, talking oxymoron — a humanist from MIT. But I think that my unique perspective as someone studying culture within one of the world’s leading technical institutions gives me some distinctive insights into the ways that culture and technology are reshaping before our very eyes.

Comparative Media Studies

One of my proudest accomplishments so far in life has been the creation of the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) graduate program at MIT. At its core, this program encourages students to think across media, across historical periods, across national borders, across academic disciplines, across the divide between theory and practice, and across the divides between the academy and the rest of society. Our goal is simply to train the next generation of leaders for industry, government, education, the arts, journalism, and academia to think in more imaginative ways about the process of media change. I like to joke that CMS is a program for people who could never decide what they wanted to major in. It is “undisciplined” in the best sense of the terms — my own sense is that the academic disciplines which emerged around the problems of the industrial age have outlived their usefulness in a networked culture and that we need to reconfigure the ways we organize and communicate knowledge to our students.

Central to the vision of CMS is the idea of “applied humanism.” MIT has applied math, applied physics, and applied chemistry so it made sense to me that there should be an applied branch of the humanities. Our goal is to take what we are teaching in our classrooms and give students a chance to apply it more pragmatically to think through some of the core challenges being faced out in the field as core institutions confront media change. With this in mind, we have launched a range of research initiatives which I will be writing more about as this blog continues.

Convergence Culture Consortium

The Convergence Culture Consortium is a direct outgrowth of the books coming out this summer. We wanted to bring together key thinkers from a number of different disciplines and universities who were interested in the kinds of social and cultural changes that were impacted the branded entertainment sector. We wanted to bring together leading entertainment companies, advertising firms, and key sponsors to create a dialogue about where media is going and how it impacts consumers. We are developing white papers on topics such as advergaming and product placement, transmedia storytelling and mobile entertainment, alternative reality games, and fan cultures, among other topics. And I get to go into places like Cartoon Network or the MTV Networks and lecture them about what they need to know about the fan communities I study.

Project NML

Project New Media Literacies also grows out of the ideas in my most recent books. Here, the focus is on the educational challenges of making sure that every kid in America has the social skills and cultural competencies needed to participate in a networked society. According to a recent study by the Pew Center for Internet and American Life, more than half of all American teens have produced media and a significant portion have distributed that media content on line. We need to be aware of the challenges faced by both halves of that statistic — those faced by media makers who lack the traditional mentorship and apprenticeship into production practices and ethical norms which would have shaped previous generations of media makers (student journalists, for example) and those faced by those who are not yet making media — what we are calling the participation gap between those who have anywhere, anytime access and those who may only be able to go online on a library computer with limited bandwidth, filtered content, short work spans, and no capacity to store or upload what they create. This project argues that media literacy skills, broadly defined, need to be integrated into school-based and after-school programs, into adult education for parents and teachers, and into popular culture itself if we are going to fully address the challenges of this moment of media in transition.

The Education Arcade

The Education Arcade represents a systematic attempt to explore and experiment with the pedagogical potentials of computer and video games. I was one of the first humanities scholars in the world to write seriously about video games — not as a social problem but as an emerging medium of aesthetic expression and social experience. Through the years, my work on games has led me to consult with Purple Moon on the development of the girls game movement (and later to co-edit a book, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games), to run a creative leaders program for Electronic Arts, to become a key public critic of the media effects argument and the push to regulate games content, and to become actively involved in the design and implementation of “serious games.”

We have more new initiatives coming soon — including, we hope, some work on public policy and civic media. But these three initiatives illustrate the ways we are trying to fuse theory and practice through the program.

I never can keep my personal life separated from my professional life. This is what comes of being a fan/academic. Much of what I write about popular culture comes from an autobiographical impulse and also reflects the tastes and interests of my son, Henry, now in his mid-twenties, and my wife, Cynthia, who helped get me into fan culture in the first place. I also seek inspiration from not only the students I teach through the CMS program but also the students who live in Senior House, the dorm where I am housemaster. I expect all of these folks will be making appearances in my blog posts from time to time. My wife would no doubt tell you that it is symptomatic of my workaholic tendencies that I cram my personal life into the last paragraph of an overly long and overly detailed account of my life. The reality is that most of my work is deeply personal and my personal relationships shape everything else I do.

And Now a Blog…

This blog is frankly long overdue. I’ve wanted to have a blog for some time. I used to blog for Technology Review; we run blogs for many of the projects; and I’ve run blogs through several of my classes. But I have until now been reluctant to make the time commitment needed to make a personal blog work. Reread the account above and you will see the reason why I have been a little preoccupied. So I’ve blogged for other people; I’ve written about blog; and now I have my own blog.

Comments

Hello Henry. You probably don’t remember me. I was briefly quoted in your TP book on B&B fandom.

Fandom has come a long way since then, and the internet has greatly changed it! (Not all for the better, either, I’m afraid). I’m sure you might have heard of “Fandom Wank”, and wanted to bring “The Ms.Scribe Story” to your attention…:

I’m wondering if you plan on doing any kind of analysis on how the role of the internet has changed the psychology of fandom for the better and the worse. I’m also interested in understanding the almost “Mob Mentality” behind these interent flame wars where individuals “jump to the rescue” of their internet friends, and what would prompt a person to create a FICTICIOUS persona to berate themselves with in order to garner sympathy and attention from those internet friends. I can understand creating a persona to hide your real identity behind, but not to create a virual adversary who you use to attack yourself with. (Let alone dozens of virtual adversaries, although I admit this was probably an extreme instance from a very troubled individual.)

Or, perhaps, everything on the internet is a myth, and even the Ms.Scribe story isn’t true, nor any of the players or websites. (Dunno.. but it is another extreme to consider, I suppose)

I’ve been a fan (an aca/fan?) of your work since Poaching and am excited by this new blog.

I’m wondering to what extent the participatory culture of fandoms does or does not affect academic cultures? For example, academic publishing seems to be more and more conservative, more “broadcast” rather than “niche market” oriented.

My own feeling has always been that the best “participatory” invoking television (my own interests have been Highlander and Xena) are from shows that are not seemlessly written, not exactly grade “A” (whatever that might mean) but “B” — shows that have lots of “holes” fans can fill in in various forms of participation.

My own academic aspirations are to produce not seemlessly argued academic texts, but suggestively extensive ones — not intensively analytical, but maybe full of their own proper “holes” to be filled in.

Trying to create and argue for this seems to be an uphill battle now. Or is it? Do you have thoughts about this?

Best wishes and many thanks for great work all these years. The current projects sound amazing!

I have thought a long time about the Superman piece. I think that those of us who come from various difficult backgrounds, need a super something, maybe not superman but something, or some person who can make the problems of the day go away. That is the idea that it could happen. Some people dream of the lottery, some people dream of making it rich with selling real estate or that the deal or no deal mania, will make a difference in their life.

Some of us look at people who may not be Superman, but those who were able to achieve, to be , to do things in spite of various handicaps, or lack of a privileged background.

Actually, being in touch with you and the media lab made me feel powerful.

I went to a small HBCU, the education was ok, but there was not the dream of MIT. I was dreaming California, Stanford or Berkeley.. but my dad told me to just imagine that I was there and to work twice as hard.

Richard Pryor had a character, i won’t name him , but he was super too. Some people’s lives require the fantasy of a hero until they get a toehold on their own worth, in a world where they are constantly forgotten, put aside and left out,.. not just the digital divide, but the academic divide, and the economic divide. We look at the media, but most of the time we are not there.

So Superman, or Wonderwoman, or whomever, something mythical can be used to dream, to imagine and to think about escaping the reality of real life. Better than using drugs I think.

Then, one gets some kind of confidence, and understands enough to make it on their own terms.

Life is not fair but so what, at least by thinking, reflecting and learning, using education one can get a perspective that takes one out of the dreaming , or superhero need.

Good to find you here. I’m personally interested (as in today) in the separation of lj and blog communities — almost totally lj myself, but the fan communities I wander through are LOTR & HP, which are nearly all women. Wondering if blog fan communities are more mixed, or even male dominated?

The partcipatory and convergence cultures that you have coined are absolutly brilliant. I have cited them in my MA thesis on Harry Potter and the set jetter phenomenon, which focuses in on the HP Fan Trip 2006. Aside from addressing the production and consumption of the trip I have placed in a third chapter on this consumer/producer blur that I found evident within film tourism.

Amazing work you are doing. Truly. My company is a youth market research firm here in China and so much of your thinking is directly relevant here, though amped a thousand times and warped to fit Chinas circumstances. If there is even any information about media here that I can help you with – just shout.

Hello, I’m an occasional lurker on your blog. While doing some research for a review I was writing about Eden, a Japanese manga, I came across this tidbit at the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article on Gnosticism:

“The Gnostics developed an astounding literary activity, which produced a quantity of writings far surpassing contemporary output of Catholic literature. They were most prolific in the sphere of fiction, as it is safe to say that three-fourths of the early Christians romances about Christ and His disciples emanated from Gnostic circles. Besides these — often crude and clumsy — romances they possessed what may be called “theosophic” treatises and revelations of a highly mystical character. These are best described as a stupefying roar of bombast occasionally interrupted by a few words of real sublimity.”

Long time reader (since the mid-90s sometime), first time commenter. I’ve linked to Henry IV’s article on reality tv fanfiction at my LJ (though I have a low opinion of reality tv itself), and I’ve put, “Slash is what happens when you take away the glass,” in the queue for my weekly email sig quotation.

But the real reason I’m commenting is you seem unaware that there’s an HTML error partway through your blog’s introductory entry. From the paragraph heading “Convergence Culture” through the rest of the page (even the comments below the entry), everything’s in italics.

I am very interested it the FWJ case, bur cannot find information about this case’s outcome.

Could you be so kind and give a link where the information about results of manifestation can be found (whether the publishers fulfilled the demands or not) or tell a little more about the end of the story by youself.

It would appear I finally have a way to better describe myself to people. Had I only known that it existed, I would have gotten my degree in CMS. What would I then call myself? Math majors are called Mathematicians. Art students are artists. What would a student in CMS be?

I think we’re thinking along similar lines. I’m Brooks Lindsay, the founder of Debatepedia.org, the new “wiki” encyclopedia of arguments and debates. I think you’ll like this idea. It empowers the general public to objectively frame public debates as they exist in the public sphere between the relevant players. It enables users to present all of the unique pro and con arguments that have been made by scholars, experts, leaders, etc. It also allows editors to present the overall positions of politicians, think-tanks, interest and activist groups, foreign leaders, etc. It does not allow users to present their own arguments and opinions. Debatepedia helps resolve an outstanding question: how can “wiki” technology be successfully applied to politics, which is divisive by nature, when “wikis” are a medium of “consensus”. The important insight and bridge is that a public debate and its public arguments can be treated as documentable facts, and that the general public can arrive at a consensus in the framing of these facts. Under these strict rules, the public can successfully document a debate as if it were an encyclopedic entry, and present all of the information necessary for any individual (citizen or leader) to develop a calculated and rational position. This has large social implications, and seems to resonate with what you are doing. Take a look, and you’re welcome to get in touch with us through the site.

I am writing an essay on cosmopolitanism and literature and stumbled upon your article on pop cosmopolitanism. I think you’re doing great work – I thoroughly applaud your prolificness – but I have been hard pressed to find more info on this pop cosmopolitanism (at least in relation to what we think of as traditional literature), and I wish people would write about it more!

Henry: Thanks so much for all you’ve done in making CMS a “sexy” thing to study…When I tell people what I’m interested in teaching and talking/writing aboutand the structure of my ideas and where they fit into the grand scheme of things, I just have to point to this site or shove my dog-eared, annotated to pieces copy of [i]Textual poachers[/i]” at them and say..” This..this is what I want to do…”

Henry, I’m really curious about how you find time to write your interesting and detailed articles… I bet you are a busy man! But your articles are always well-thought out and based on facts that are not known to everybody. I also have a blog (no link cause there’s almost nothing on it), and I just can’t write… I have plenty of thoughts to share during the day but then when I come home tired, I can’t write a word… I would be pleased to read your article on blogging one day!